Kingdom Come

Awhile ago I discovered that HULU Plus had a vast selection of BBC materials, some of which I was aware and quite a bit I had never heard of.  What was I to do but drop my Netflix account (cannot serve two masters after all) and go along.  I have watch ASHESE TO ASHES and LIFE ON MARS again and LUTHER as well as REV.

I like work produced by the BEEB much more than anything produced on this side of the pound.  The writing is better and the cinematographers seem less prone to epileptic fits.  Currently I am wading my way through KINGDOM with Steven Fry.  I have been a big fan of Mr. Fry's work for quite some time but in this series I have noticed something else.

Steven Fry reminds me of Jeff.  Granted Jeff was not Gay, just shy, but in everything else they are very similar.  Intelligent, caring, polite and considerate.

It's nice to find thing like this.

Stuff I love - Prologue

When I got back from Austin I was a mess.  I had been drawn to Austin by the same thing that had drawn the Okies West during the great depression, the promise or work.  Yeah, there had been rumors of cigarette trees and a big rock candy mountain, but I didn't smoke and was watching my girlish figure, but I went to Austin because I was promised an art director's job working on an established X-Box game title.  Add to that the title was owned by Disney, so what could go wrong, right?  In my genius I packed up my entire life, gave up my apartment, and went to Texas WITHOUT a contract.

NOTE: ALWAYS get a contract.

All of that is a story for another time though because I want to talk about is what I learned when I got back.  I learned it from my friend Taunya, one of the most beautiful women I have ever known personally.  Taunya is an actress and filmmaker who had forsaken Hollywood for numerous reasons and was making a go at rebuilding her life in Salt Lake City with her daughters.  At the same time I was struggling to get a foothold back in California Taunya was doing the same in in Utah.  The difference between us was that while I was feeling sorry for myself  Taunya we reinventing herself. While I was sulking in my pal Gordon's spare room starving, Taunya was in her daughter's spare room, starving...and finding out about the local film community, and schmoozing it's denizen, and organizing them and getting together a team to produce a web series, which eventually became Raising Kayn.

I wound up volunteering to help her with that project pro bono because of something she said to me, something that I have adopted kind of as a battle cry:

"If I am going to starve, I am going to do it doing something I love!"

The work I did on Kayn was sub-par at best but the truth is laid the foundation for me rebuilding myself because it reminded me of how much I LOVE film and VFX. THAT is the centerpiece of the future I am building for myself.  Since Kayn I have been working at the things I know, things I can make money at easily, and in the background acquiring the tools I need to do what I want to do.  In the latter category I am close to being at the "put up or shut up" point.  I find myself with the tools and the skills, now all I need is the story I want to tell, a common thread amongst filmmakers.

So to start looking for that I thought I would start writing out the things that I love, the places and memories and activities that have brought me joy over the days of my life. By doing an accounting on paper rather than in my head I hope that the next step in journey will make itself apparent.

UPDATE ON THE GREAT BOOK GIVEAWAY:

I have not forgotten about this guys.  The tunneling crew is working day and night through the morass that is my shop in hopes of reaching a rich vein of pulp, beautiful pulp that I can start to distribute. Everything has been slowed down by a heavy work load but that contract winds up today/tomorrow and then we can get back to making with the book giveaway.  Stay tooned!

We interrupt rationality

This past few days I learned something.  I learned that grief is both sneaky and rapacious.  That it is an ambush predator that lounges just below the surface of day to day life and waits.  It waits for that moment when you drop  your guard.  It waits for that one fraction of a second where you start to think that you are getting a handle on the situation and you relax.

Then it strikes, like an crocodile on a zebra.  The attack is not gentle, or subtle.  When it attacks it lunges directly for your heart and latches on like a piranha.  You try everything you can to get it loose, you try and decapitated, or drug it or even just ignore it but the harder you try the harder the jaws clamp down.

Suddenly you are taken out of the "maintain an even strain" attitude you have developed like a tourist from his loafer.  You become the drowning man, flailing your arms and screaming irrationally. If someone tries to help  you try and escape the grief by turning on them, pressing their heads beneath the tsunami of pain that is engulfing you.

There is no easy way to get out, other then just coming to your senses and facing the wounds, cleaning them rather than trying to cover them with gauze.  It's never easy but it has to be done and each time this happens you get a little better at it.

The trouble is that each time the grief slips silently below the surface.

...and it waits.

"Here there be Art Collectors."

One of the side benefits of the events of the last few months is that I have gotten back in touch with some artist friends who I have lost touch with over the years.  It is a sad testament to where my head was at for so long that I let insecurities, jealousies and petty human squabbles isolate me from the very tribe that gave me so many opportunities.  Opportunities for interesting projects to work on, opportunities for friendship with a broad spectrum of fascinating, creative people.  That was then though, this is now and getting back in touch is fun and enlightening. I say "enlightening" because I have learned just how wrong perceptions can be.

When I meet new people it is often the case that, after a time, I will hear a couple of particular phrases, usually after the friendship moves into the stage where we are getting to know more about the day to day of each other's lives.  When a new friend actually starts to get a feel for how difficult the life of a freelance artist is, usually in comparison to their own more standard form life, I have notice that eventually they reach a point of incomprehension.  It is as iff they cannot fathom how someone who has spent their life gathering skills and knowledge can be treated so shabbily by the world.  It is at this point that I usually hear:

"But you are so talented..."

"...there has to be a place where they will pay you for your skills..."

and finally

"You're so clever, you will figure it out (you always do)"

So for the non artists in the audience let me pause right here. If you ever feel the desire to say any of these phrase to an artist who has just told you they were having trouble finding clients or they might lose their house because they can't make the payments or they have to go move their van because they have been parked too long in one place and the neighbors might call the cops STOP TALKING.  We have all heard it and are tired of trying to come up with clever responses.  The only thing that should come out of your mouth at that point is possibly the tip of your tongue and your incisors neatly snip it off as a result of you biting down on it to prevent the words from issuing forth.

So you will understand my embarrassment when I find myself almost using the same phrases with the friends I am getting back in touch with, artists of skill levels far greater than my own but whom I come to find are in similar situations to my own, or much worse.  As I hear about pals who have been kicked around by the changing art market those same dreaded words begin to form on my own lips more out of incredulity than anything else. The manifold manner in which the stories propagate through the friends on my contact list is even more disturbing. Unfortunately it all fits into a pattern, and that pattern is the bass track to the cacophonous soundtrack that is the "Walmarting of America".

The problem is simple, Americans have never been a highly cultured people.  That can be witnessed by how many painting/ prints that Thomas Kincaid and the Keene sold over their careers. Even worse, with the advent of world markets that allow offshore art to borough in as "textile materials" and the internet serving as a gateway to the "World Market" art has ceased being a luxury item and it has become a commodity. Additionally, in a market driven by contracting paychecks and a communal lifestyle more about Large box stores than cottage industry the concept of PRICE point rears it's ugly head.

Most of my friends and I come from a time when there were Collectors", something we now speak of in the same hushed tones once reserved for the margins of maps where antiquarian cartographers scrawled...

"Here there be DRAGONS."

In the past we lived in the same ways that Defense contractors did in the heyday of the cold war, we did original paintings and sold them for high prices.  The trouble is now that model no longer works and a lot of artists haven't kept up with either the market nor the technology that fuels it changes.  This latter point makes me sad because as I listen to my pals bemoan the extinction of the wily art collector in the wild it becomes obvious that a lot of them are tired, confused and don't realize that even though things have changed they have not changed necessarily for the worse.

The truth is that if you are aware, pay attention and learn from the past the options for the freelance artists in the world are better than they have ever been.

What are they? Well we will talk about that tomorrow...

Doggeral: Ep 3

So I spent as much time as I could yesterday excavating the boxes I need to get at to start the distribution of the wealth.  Unfortunately the weather got too warm to carry on so I had to go back and hide in my "Digital Cave".  The Great book giveaway will happen soon, and I expect it will expand to include DVDs and CDs as well so stay tuned for that.

The last few days have not been as productive as I would like, been feeling under the wether a bit and I fear I may have just crashed as a result of the pace I have been maintaining since I parted ways with my last employer. Still what has kept me going is that this project has gotten me back into my art, the art I spent years struggling and grinding and waiting for the technology to catch up with what I wanted to do. These days I look at the tools available just off the shelf and what they are capable of of and I get excited.  At time I will admit I am jealous of all the young artists coming up, the ones who see the capabilities of the tools to work wonders and tell a story rather than simply as a means to make a living.  If you are working for someone else in the VFX world these days then you are pretty well screwed, but if you have a story to tell and a vision of how you want to tell it then the world is in fact your oyster.

Doggeral Ep 2: Further Details

Thinking further about the giveaway I want to make things a little more interesting , because why do this if it isn't fun and interactive?  So to spice it up there are a couple of new rules

1) If you see a book and request it you CANNOT sell it for at least a year.  Whereas I know this is hard to confirm for me I have to trust in the fact that if you ARE my friend you will respect both my wishes and the spirit in which the books are being given.

2) Handling one book at a time would be far more work then the game implies so your minimum order is 3.  Additionally I will be breaking the books up into "Column A" and "Column B" and "Column C"  You have to take one from each column.

3) Packing and post will be via Paypal

More STUFF in a bit.

Doggeral: Ep 1

It is an artifact of this "Atomic Digital Age" in which we live that on occasion I see a word, or phrase, or one comes to me on the toilet or in the shower and I needs must rush hence to my registrar and save that name as a domain.  Thus I make a concept MINE for eternity (and it only costs me $8.99 a year).  I am not unique in this, far from it.  At Monday Night Dinner I have compared lists of fallow domain under my control and found that I am an amateur .  I have 33, which is why I wear old sneakers I expect.

*****

So I am in need of a green screen room, it is just something I need to do what I want to do.  The trouble is that the one area I have that is large enough for such a thing, my garage NE: Shop, is jammed full with crap.  It wasn't always full of crap.  It used to be a work area where I built furniture, boats and race cars.  That all ended though with the onset of the madness of the commuter wars, augmented by a slide into madness on the part of my entire family involving STUFF.

We have a lot of STUFF.  Our STUFF is important to us.  For some reason we cannot bring ourselves to part with our STUFF.  Much of our STUFF we haven't touched or seen in years, but we still allow it to linger, we still keep it about to clog our cabinets and block our way in the dark, even going so far as to trip us up in the night.

Ungrateful STUFF.

It was a few years ago, when the STUFF issue truly started to get of hand that we had a pow wow about the onset of the STUFF Tsunami.  It was then we realized that the piles and piles of books and paper and etc was where we kept our memories, we were attached to our STUFF in an unhealthy way.

So in the wake of everything with Jeff's passing I have resolved to deal with the STUFF issue.  A lot will go into the trash, some will get donated or sold.  I have some really COOL STUFF though and I would hate to see it go to waste.  So in the coming weeks I will be posting some of this STUFF on here and offering it up to anyone who wants it, so long as they are willing to pony up the dough for postage and packing.

Stay tuned.

Choose wisely

Friday I looked out over the  crowd at Jeff's memorial and I found myself "Billy Pilgriming".

[NOTE:If you have never read Kurt Vonnegut in general and SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE specifically I feel sorry for you and you should follow the link and pick up a copy NOW. If you are older and did not read him when you were young, well once again I feel for you.]

My first girlfriend, Valerie, and I came up with that term to describe that moment when an external stimuli unfixed you in the timeline of your life and you find yourself traveling, unbidden, back to another time and place.  This is not to be confused with memory, which is a simple act of recall, when you BILLY PILGRIM you are IN that moment IMMEDIATELY.  When it happens the events are all-around you, you are surrounded by the world of the time in question.  You might actually be able to SMELL what was cooking or the trees in bloom, FEEL the warmth of a long lost summer sun or the rough weave of Levis wet from a dip in the river against your skin.  It is more than memory, it is akin to being unstuck in time.

Jeff and I were friends for so long, passed through so many phases of our lives as friends and companions, that his memorial attracted visitors from a number of "lives" that I have lived.  There was a ubiquitous table of racers of course, the most recent phase, as well as people from places in Jeff's timeline I did not know (work and before we met), but there were also those people from the place on the venn diagram of our days where the circle intersected.  People from Fandom, people from College and so on.

As I looked out on their faces, all drawn together in love for Jeff and to support my family and I realized something, I still loved them all. Each and everyone of them took me back to a time, as Vonnegut put it:

"...when everything was Beautiful
and nothing hurt"

These days a lot of things hurt, physically and emotionally, but seeing the faces of these time travelers of my time line was like a cooling balm that soothed like the touch of the Witch of Westmereland. Their presence made the pains of the years fall away like parasites cleaned away. Smiling faces reminded me of costume parties, and musty classroom redolent with the smell of work print and acetone. I was suddenly in hallways singing bawdy song late at night with the thrill of a young man, just coming of age, that were I just a few years younger I would be doing something naughty.

So much of our culture now is influenced by metaphors from media.  As a refugee from the game development world one springs to mind immediately, the idea that in a game you are given "multiple lives" and that if you DIE you will suddenly be brought back whole and strong to your companions.  Nothing could be further from the truth, we get one shot at it boys and girls.

In addition to this there is simple fact that even though you will meet people throughout your life, the ones that you meet when you are young and starting out will always be the strongest bond.  They will be the ones you do stupid things with, who hold your hair and bail you out and come to get you when that car that was "such a deal" strands you in Kettleman's City on New Years day. They will also be the ones who hold these memories in trust for you for the time when you need to be reminded how good life is and what it is like to really laugh and sing.

So if there is anyone out there who is reading this who has just set their feet upon the road I will give you this one pearl of advice, Choose wisely.  Choose wisely the people who will be the guardians of your early days.

Looking out on that gathering of friends on Friday I realized I had...

Can you feel your heart?

I can feel mine, I feel it everyday.  I have felt it, consciously felt it, since I was in the hospital in Austin when I had my pacemaker emplaned.  Every move I  make with my upper body I feel it.  Every meal I eat I wonder how the food I am consuming is effecting my blood, because that is what the heart pumps after all and if the blood is effected then so must the heart be.  I look at the food before I eat it and wonder:

"Will this kill me?"

I know it sounds melodramatic but hey, when you are living with CHF that sort of thing just comes to you unbidden.  OK, it helps if you are a drama king/queen but I think even the most circumspect and mundane amongst us have to think something like that, after all living with a bad heart is living with real life everyday.

REAL life, if I might quantify, is the life that history turns on.  It isn't a fantasy or a PHOTOSHOP image, it is real by its very definition.  it is life and death, it is that thing that effects not only us but those around us.  Those we love.  Those who count on us and who will be wounded with our passing.

I am trying not to be as morose about all this going forward.  Jeff's passing, the fact that he was 2 years younger than me and still died of what appears to be heart related complications, is a harsh taste of reality.  I have to color it though with the harsh realities about my friend, that he never met a vegetable he liked and that cheese was a part of everyday.  Yes he stopped drinking long ago, but he did not stop eating the wrong things which in the end can kill you just as dead as Jack Daniels.

When they scanned me last September the Doctor told me I did not have coronary artery disease, my veins were clear.  In that there is not an answer but there is hope.  I am learning that a compulsive personality and drink are a dragon you have to face everyday.  In AA they call it a sickness and call upon a "higher power" to help them in their fight with it.  That's why AA doesn't work for me.

I'm not an atheist, I think it is the height of arrogance to think that my little monkey brain can comprehend anything so large as to be able to create everything.  It is the height of pride to think that anything so large has time for the piddling day to day goings on of my little life.  I do believe in free will though, and that few things are as unstoppable as the human spirit.

So it's been four days since I had a drink, three days since I acknowledged my best friend has slipped his moorings and drifted away and it's time to get on with everything.

I know it's time because the sun is up and I can feel my heart.

So How was your weekend?

It is one of those Mondays where I am glad to be back to work. That is not because it was bad this time, but rather because I have new ideas and new focus and want to apply them.

Friday was the Celebration of my friend/brother Jeff's life in Sacramento and it held some surprises. First was a pal from film school showed up I had not seen in 8 years and we did some catching up, as well as resolved to keep in closer touch.  I told him that I would like to do some projects together but we will have to see how that goes.  Additionally Laurie's best friend surprised us by showing up from Oregon.  She is still like family for all of us and a ball of positive energy so it was good to have her there.  The turn out was very good and there was nothing but love and support, both for Jeff and for those of us left behind.  Nicholas gave a great Eulogy and I talked for 10 minutes, it was good to get it out. In the end the entire event was much more cathartic than any of us thought it would be.  When it was over though it was as if all the energy in our bodies had been drained from us. We were all in our respective bed far earlier then usual.  In my case I was surprised that my dreams had returned (they had been missing since that day in Pennsylvania) and they were positive and refreshing. 

My former roommate, Gordon Garb, showed up at the memorial and reminded me that TEDx was this past weekend, which I knew but because the client still(s) has not paid me for all the work I have been doing, and I had to use up my reserves paying one of my artists so he wouldn't quit, I had not bought tickets.  Gordon surprised us and bought ticket for all of us and on Saturday showed up and gave Nick and I a ride to the event.

At TEDx the speakers were all pretty good but two stood out.  The first was Tatjana Dzamboza who works in AUTODESK's 3D scanning research unit.  She spoke on the advances in PHOTOGRAMETRY, where you use multiple photographs to reconstruct a 3D model of an object and how that is being applied to reconstructing the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan that were dynamited by the Taliban. They were able to build a 3D model of the Buddahs using tourist photos and pictures taken by expeditions before they were destroyed.

The other speaker who stood out was Dr. Robert Rubin, an

oceanographer at Santa Rosa JC who has been doing work with Manta Rays.  He told an amazing story about his experiences in the Sea of Cortez that made it so I will never think of Manta Rays in the same way again.

Sunday Nicholas and I did a Father's day tradition, a trip to the movies.  We went to see HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 ,which was wonderful.  The film was beautiful and I think did some things that I had never seen done in 3D animated films before.  The design was beautiful (and I saw my pal Peter Chan's name in the design crew which was cool), the music was wonderful and it really set me to thinking about where I want to go next, after this project winds up next week.

I am standing on a ridge between video film and digital and I am not sure where my heart really lies. After the TEDx event I spoke with Tatjana and when I told her what I was working on with BCM (using game theory for teaching) she was very interested and wanted to talk further. At the same time I have been wanting to pursue my video further.  What will I do?  Well I think I will leave myself open to the opportunities that present themselves and go where the gods lead me.

The morning after

Yesterday's memorial for my brother/best friend Jeff went really well.  We met so many of the people we had heard about for so many years that Jeff had worked with and heard their stories of how much he had effected their lives.  The turn out didn't surprise anyone, but I think it would have surprised Jeff.  I truly don't think that he ever understood how strong and positive an impact he had on people.  Those of us who knew and loved him tried to tell him but he was just too stubborn to listen.

We had stubbornness in common. Now I am going forward without my wingman so I have to deal with that stubbornness on my own.  The stubbornness to not stop poisoning myself with drink. The stubbornness not to acknowledge that whereas my body is older, and thus handling everything it comes in contact with differently, I still have the power to change things for the better before I join Jeff in the great beyond.  I am carrying about 60 lbs too many, I need to shed as much of that as I can in the coming weeks and months.

The question is how?

Further ways in which I seem to have decided to kill myself...

This week I have been dealing with a lot of stressed phone calls from other people.  Stressed artists who are working on a project looking to me to find out why a multibillion dollar client seems to have trouble paying us for the work we are doing.  Stressful calls from the clients, apologizing for their backers being slow to pay and can our team please keep working even though we haven't been paid. Calls from other clients saying that the site I just built for him "is down" (he needed to refresh his browser).

Stress, like rust, never sleeps.

I could add a plethora of other things to the mix, car troubles and the like, but we all have those.  They are all just logs in the Jenga stack of everyday life, the stack we add to everyday flinching away from it as we remove our hand for fear of the oncoming clatter of collapse.

This week I have the added stress of the memorial service for my lost friend/brother Jeff.  It;s tomorrow and I have not written a thing yet to say about the best friend I ever had and how his sudden absence has left a huge gap in my life. I will write something, and I have to lay our a sheet for his service as well  but I have been putting it off.  Putting it off in the same way that I have been putting off accepting that he has gone.  It is no wonder that I have started having a drink now and again...or everyday.

Let me say flat out that I should not be drinking, that drinking was one of the cheif causes of my heart problems.

Let me rephrase that

ALCOHOL WAS THE CHIEF THING THAT HAS IN THE PAST ATTEMPTED TO KILL MY HEART AND IS STILL TRYING TO EVERY TIME I PUT IT INTO MY BODY.

So why is it then that I go out most nights to the liquor store and pick up a crappy canned Club Martini, which I then take back to my room, pour over ice and pretend I am John Steed while I choke down it's vile flavor?  Well it could be attributed to genetics, it could be attributed to the stress of my everyday life, it could be written off at a lifetime of conditioning that tells me it is both acceptable and cool to do...

Wait, stop right there.  As a close friend told me yesterday, those are just excuses.  Drunks make excuses, it's how they stay drunks.  The trouble is though excuses like these can kill me, they should be registered more carefully then assault weapons (not difficult)

Hot fun in the summertime

Another warm day here in Petaluma, my home town. just around noon and things are already heating up nicely.

What is also heating up nicely is my desire for change.  I need to write about it, here in public, to serve as motivation.  This way I am not saying what I PLAN TO DO, I am documenting what I am doing.  Like stopping drinking.  Like going back to the eating pattern I had before I went to work at Nuvolum, namely eating fresh whole foods I cook myself, eating less of it and getting more exercise. Unfortunately I stepped outside to go for a walk and it was already 82 degrees with no breeze.  Not weather for a fat boy with a dickey heart to go walking in.

So back to the computer, tummy growling away, head grumbling about having too much to do and wouldn't a beer taste real good about now...

I am legion (at least inside my head)

Killing me slowly...

When you lose someone who is near and dear to you it's tough.  It's especially tough if that person dies because due to a condition that was treatable. So, delving deeper, what if that treatable condition is one that you recognized the symptoms of and warned them about it, advising them to get checked out repeatedly.

That would suck, don't you think?

So (taking it EVEN further) what if you recognized the symptoms of that condition not because you had read about them online or heard about them but because YOU had experienced them YOURSELF.

In literature I think they would call that a "wake up call", don't you think?

Finally, what if despite said wake up call you ignored the passing of the loved one and continued along your merry way doing things you know are bad for you but for which you can find myriad excuses?

I feel like that just now, like I am reliving LEAVING LOST VEGAS only with a salami sandwich with a gin chaser.